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ETA:Since on reread my posts sounded a tad hostile I just want to make clear that they weren't intended that way. It's more a matter of me being a bit surprised by your sudden impulse to correct other people on minor things.
It's a function of
Proto's pretensions of having a better understanding of history and politics than his rhetorical opponents, including myself. If you're going to claim intellectual superiority, you should at least have the decency of using proper spelling and grammar in whatever language you're debating in.
If the star trek world is neither more moral, nor less moral than the real world, than both worlds are equally moral.
That's one conclusion you could draw. The other is that the Star Trek Universe is
sometimes more or less moral than the real one, but not inherently so.
Some more quotes:
Sci said:
One word: Bullshit.
The Star Trek Universe is not somehow inherently more or less moral than the real one. It simply possesses political actors who are more dedicated to the principles of modern liberal democracy than most people in the real world today, from whose POV we see the STU. To argue that the Star Trek Universe "possesses a moral substrate" that the real world lacks is an absurd piece of nonsense
What I'm saying is that the real world is far more moral, and the Star Trek Universe far more immoral, than you're portraying either as being. Both the real world and the Trekverse are full of moral ambiguities, and to try to claim that there's some fundamental moral constant that's different in one from the other is nothing more than a cheap tactic
So, no difference between the trekverse and the universe. Real world facts and star trek examples - the same thing, right?
No. I argued that there is no
inherent or
fundamental difference. That doesn't mean that there can't be a difference, but that the difference is not inherent. As I noted above, how moral or amoral the Trekverse functions can be a matter of which story is being told. As a fictional construct, the "moral structure" of the Trekverse is a flexible, mutable thing, whereas, if one can be said to exist for the real world, it is likely fixed.
As I've noted time and again, you have a habit of taking a statement of someone else's and then pushing it to make it say something that it doesn't actually say. It's getting damn irritating. Stop putting words in my mouth.
So, at present, if you were to talk about the real world, you would use a real world example - good to know.
And this is also the point I made - than when talkinng about the real world, a real historical fact has more relavance than an dismissible star trek example.
If that is the point you made, then I would suggest that you used poor language to make it. I will readily concede that a real, historical example has more relevance to the real world than an example from any fictional construct -- but your language seemed to be saying that a fictional example has
no relevance whatsoever to the real world and that they could all be dismissed. I firmly reject that conclusion -- fiction, like any form of expression or argumentation, can be a powerful and deeply meaningful way of describing and expressing the world, as books like
Night or
Nineteen Eighty-Four, or as films like
The Last King of Scotland or
The Queen, prove.
As for the fundamental physical laws of the universe:
ProtoAvatar said:
he universe in not moral or imoral; it's simply indifferent. An electron will not collapse its wave function in a certain way because it's moral or imoral; it will follow probability - the roll of the dice.
Not so in star trek. There the roll of the dice is always counterfeit; the result will always favour the altruist, the main character, the moral of the story or simply the whims of the author. The main characters will die only when the actor's contract has expired or (in the novels) when they have become useless. Here, altrusm will always be rewarded in the long run.
When one talks about the nature of the universe, these fundamentals are ALWAYS relevant.
I never said they weren't. But you are inaccurately representing the fundamentals in the Trekverse. The roll of the dice is not always counterfeit, the result does not always favor the altruist, the main character, the moral of the story, or the whims of the author. Millions of altruistic Bajorans were killed in the Occupation. Billions of Cardassians were murdered by the Dominion. Seven million Humans were murdered by the Xindi (of whom only the Reptilians and the Insectoids were held responsible, whilst the rest of the Xindi Council went unscathed). We've seen main characters die plenty of times (perhaps most infamously in the TrekLit world in
Wildfire), and the authors have made it clear on numerous occasions that they tend to find the creation of those stories to be deeply upsetting, not "a whim."
That is why your argument is specious: It presents the premise that everything always works out for the best in the end, and it ignores numerous pieces of evidence in the Trekverse that everything does
not always work out in the end. It falsely represents the fundamentals of the Trekverse.
Put a bomb in a restaurant and killed X people, or engaged in a resistance campaign to alter public opinion? Put a bomb in a restaurant and killed X people, or was framed by the oppressive government for the actions of another person?
Regardless of the motivation, of the value given to the fact, of misinformation or propaganda, the fact remains: a person put a bomb in a restaurant and killed X people - it's objective.
But that's not what history is about. History is about the
meaning of that event, about the motives behind it and the forces that it unleashes and the ways it changes society. And all of that is deeply subjective.
"History is the process by which a culture decides for itself the meaning of its past."
The culture may decide the meaning, put the past doesn't change - it's objective, non-changeable.
The culture may decide to "forget" or "change" some elements of the past, but history remains, waiting to be discovered behind all the lies.
You are confusing the past with history. They are not the same concepts. The past doesn't change, but
history -- which is our
understanding of the past -- changes constantly.
What you are "trying" to prove:
that there are degrees of anything,
I never said otherwise - feel free to check.
You were the one bickering that I see things in back and white and so forth - I ignored these declarations because they're unssupported nonsense and I was trying to be civil.
You're sour when you loose an argument, Sci. Did you know that?
Yes, that's right.
I'm the one who's sour.
You are the one who began using very disrespectful, condescending language against other posters who expressed and logically supported their disagreements with you (such as in
this post). You are the one who chose to make personal insults and slights, and who has consistently resorted to insults since. Don't be surprised when someone calls you on it.
About your next post - make it shorter, more concise. You said you are studying political science, right? It shows - interminable posts with little of substance.
Once again, resorting to insults rather than logically supporting your conclusions. (Though, of course, given your tendency to engage in unfair over-generalizations, that's not surprising.)
)
.
- I'm just waiting for amazon to finally send it to me...
